How great an ill is love to man

And so to the theatre; the National Theatre no less. I think the last time that I went to a performance there was to see Sir Ian McKellen give his Richard III and that was a long, long time ago. But now it was to see Helen McCrory as Euripides' Medea. Obviously Jacobean tragedy hadn't been bloodthirsty enough for me so I needed a fix of the Greek. You will recall that back in November I saw Il Giasone by Cavalli which also features Medea and Jason, but any resemblance between that story and this one is entirely...well there isn't one.

Nor with this one

 Firstly, I cannot praise McCrory enough for a powerful performance that gripped the audience, she is ably supported by Danny Sapani as Jason and you should see it if you can. And as it's being live streamed to cinemas, you can. Be warned though; it's heavy stuff, dealing with what is possibly the most unthinkable of crimes.

However, I did have some reservations. Firstly, I didn't like the translation. I don't want to imply that I am familiar with the original Greek text - for the avoidance of doubt Epictetus is merely a nom de pseud - but Ben Power's version lacked the poetry necessary to carry it off as Tragedy and relegated it to merely tragic. And secondly there was the music (by Alison Goldfrapp) and, even more, the use made of it by the director. If they were making a music video it would have worked, albeit that Michael Jackson would probably have sued for plagiarism, but in this context it didn't. Disco infanticide, I don't think so.

Browning is back! Hello! Hello!

I have been to the new exhibition at the Henry Moore Institute and it is, to use the argot of the professional art critic, pants. The premise of the show, entitled 'Indifferent Matter' is to 'explore how objects resist and are coerced into becoming sculptures' and it does this by including a load of old rubbish - literally in the case of a lump of asphalt, which Robert Smithson wittily named 'Asphalt Lump' when he picked it up from the waste around a steel mill in 1969 and claimed it was a sculpture because he said it was.

That isn't to say that there isn't some nice stuff. There is a Warhol piece 'Silver Clouds' which, if deconstructed could be dismissed as simply some helium filled balloons being blown about by a fan, but which, in place, is actually rather splendid. The best pieces are some exquisite 4,000 year old jade discs from China. They are here because no-one knows their original use, but their effect, far from supporting the exhibition curator's hypothesis, is instead to highlight the importance of craftsmanship. For me the futility of the whole thing is exemplified by the eoliths on display. They are meant to pose the philosophical question as to how there importance has changed now it is known that they are natural rather than man made. Now I, self-evidently, do like a philosophical question, but not one of those for which the answer is bleedin' obvious. They clearly do not now have any importance, except as a minor, minor footnote in the history of how science sometimes gets things wrong.

So why do exhibitions like this get put on? In the words of the Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney whose death has been announced today (1).

'Now, you're supposed to be
An educated man, '
I hear him say. 'Puzzle me
The right answer to that one.'

And on the subject of bad science, this is interesting.

I also attended a lecture on the subject of the Cyclops through the ages, starting - reasonably enough - with Homer and moving via Harryhausen to Spongebob Squarepants. Fascinating.

(1) except of course for the Prometheus in Aspic blog, which announced it some years ago